Madonna and Me (13 page)

In American television broadcasting there is a specific term for the late-night hours during which broadcasters are allowed to transmit material deemed indecent. Referred to as “the safe harbor,” it is a time slot generally reserved for material that falls outside the sexual norm. Subsequently, a large part of Madonna’s music video canon was slotted to air here. In a culture where we are so often asked to hide our fringe desires, I find this term strangely reassuring. Those of us with a secret identity and a compulsion to hide it, those of us who
engage in something forbidden, can find reassurance and protection from storm or attack.

My awareness of the forbidden began to coalesce around the time of the 1989 release of “Like a Prayer,” a song and video that, at its core, contradicts any doubt that sexuality can be sacred and sublime. While I was a preteen learning how to be complicit in a culture of shame, Madonna delivered a triumphant pop anthem that successfully brought sickly sweet romantic love and euphoric lust to holy status. The video literally sent a scantily clad, confident, and self-sexualized Madonna to church, and the controversy that followed was my first mainstream taste of a woman’s sexuality being relegated to the realm of the forbidden. When Madonna is “down on her knees” promising to “take you there,” she’s providing a lyrical ambiguity that forces us to question whether or not she’s articulating holy devotion or sexual satisfaction. The reality is that she’s coyly articulating both, gleefully spitting in the face of those who would question that they can’t be one and the same.

The true art of the music video is, much like Barbie bound and gagged in that pink Corvette, fantasy reenactment. Madonna videos were my earliest exposure to BDSM imagery and the transcendent possibilities of power exchange, however watered down and MTV-friendly those early nods were. When I was no more than ten, Madonna was urging her listeners to “express themselves” in a glossy, uncomplicated version of sex-positive feminism. Visually that expression was dressed in nothing but white bed sheets and a metal collar on the end of a chain, making Madonna a consenting “pet” to the sweaty, hulking object of her desire. “Express Yourself ” was, at the time, the most expensive music video ever made, and Madonna’s feminism put her in both a pinstriped suit and black lingerie crawling cat-like under a dining room table to lap up milk from a bowl on the floor. The conclusion? Her paramour, a well-built steelworker oppressed by “the man” and fresh from a fistfight, comes to her and takes immediate control before falling to his
manly knees in front of her. It was the first visual representation that I, a sexually confused preteen, had of the statement that “the submissive has all the power.”

A year later,
The Immaculate Collection
brought with it “Justify My Love.” The grainy art-house–style video, now laughably tame compared to Christina Aguilera’s assless chaps and Britney Spears nude in the steam room, features a distressed Madonna breathlessly wandering the halls of an “alternative lifestyle,” partner-swapping hotel. Every open door reveals gender-ambiguous couples exploring fetish, clad in leather and latex. Madonna proceeds to have a tryst with a mysterious and presumably recent acquaintance in a flurry of voyeuristic, gender-bending, and general gleeful eroticism. “Justify My Love” sparked international controversy and was banned by MTV, outraging Madonna and provoking her to publicly defend it. The mainstream’s rejection of the video confirmed that fringe sexuality was thoroughly unwelcome. Although nudity was cited as the reason, the only actual nudity in the video is a topless dominatrix with suspenders strategically covering her breasts (an obvious homage to
The Night Porter
’s Charlotte Rampling.) It is far more likely that the dominatrix’s rough treatment of a bound man, among other Dominant/ submissive (D/s) and androgynous imagery, was responsible for the argument that it was unsuitable for public consumption.

With every bold step in Madonna’s career, the mainstream reaction made it clear that any sexuality that fell outside the sanctioned norm—like mine—would be forced into hiding if it reared its “ugly” head. Though that knowledge is difficult to swallow for someone coming into their first desires, Madonna had a bestselling video single driven by the hand-wringing and slut-shaming of public curiosity. In a
Night-line
interview about censorship, it was suggested that Madonna was set to earn more money from the video being banned than if it hadn’t.

Her response? “Yeah, so? Lucky me.”

When I was thirteen, and sexuality was delivered to me via cable television’s midnight blue movies when my parents were out for the night, Madonna donned a mask, raised a riding crop, and proclaimed that “only the one who hurts you can make you feel better.” While I was accustomed only to boisterous, bawdy, and generally misinformed schoolyard talks of sex acts, her “Erotica” video is five glossy minutes of unadulterated BDSM bliss, a collection of images I’d never seen before but was immediately drawn to. Mainstream entertainment showed featured clips of the video in prime time while proclaiming it obscene and again banned it from the airways.

Whatever this was, it was wrong—and I desperately wanted to be a part of it.

The mainstream condemnation of the “Erotica” video, “Justify My Love,” and the
Sex
book were the first times I realized that my desires—the very same ones that had sprouted innocently from play and bath-time—were contraband. Depictions of consensual sexual practices by empowered women were censored and relegated to “safe harbor,” while news of Canada’s Scarborough rapist, Paul Bernardo, and his countless female victims screamed from local dinnertime airwaves. At the same time, a reluctant female teacher took me and the other girls at school aside to explain, in a stern voice, how afraid we should be of sex, and the inevitable disease and pregnancy that came with it. While Madonna and her nearly naked friends cavorted around fearless in blissful black-and-white bondage, celebrating their capacity for pleasure and pain, I was being indoctrinated into a post-AIDS sexual education that taught me that pleasurable urges led to death, and that the possibility of sexual violence lurked in every bush and at every bus stop.

For these reasons, the teenager with sexual inclinations outside of the mainstream is rarely a happy creature. Sexual awakening coincides with indoctrination into shame and fear, young women in particular bearing the burden of their potential victimhood (and sluthood). This reality was emphasized to me once I started writing
openly about sexual submission. I received letters from teenage girls lamenting not only a puritanical status quo, but an oft-judgmental school of feminism that looked down its nose at any woman’s desire to consensually subjugate herself. We find our fearless heroes where we can, and for those whose puberty coincided with Madonna’s fierce challenging of sexual norms, her defiance was an obvious choice.

For me, those teenage years devolved into the kind of relationships one might blame on a penchant for submission. Date rapists and domestic abusers littered the landscape—a shiner here and the questionable consent of a drunk fuck there. By the time I was legal to drink and vote, I had latched firmly on to feminism, which made me feel a desperate need to shelve the submission in order to “pass” and carry the card. Third-wave feminism promised sex-positivity, as long as the focus was female pleasure and not pain, even the consensual variety. I hid my private daydreams and dramatic reenactments while I fumbled fruitlessly with cautious men raised on antisex rhetoric. The desire to be dominated needed to be relegated to a metaphoric “safe harbor,” a place in the dark where it was understood that these things weren’t discussed in daylight.

Madonna didn’t seem to feel the same need for that “either/or” scenario I felt suffocated by every day. When it came to female empowerment and sexually submitting, her words and imagery suggested the two could coexist peacefully and powerfully. When I was sixteen and on the cusp of losing my virginity, she was unapologetic about her behavior in “Erotica” and
Sex
, quite literally saying “I’m not sorry” while raising that signature riding crop in the video for “Human Behavior.” Clad in black leather and latex, she was more jovial, playful, and defiant than ever before. She even went as far as to ask, “Would it sound better if I were a man?” and it became impossible not to wonder.

For all its good intentions, “express yourself, don’t repress yourself” was liberating in theory but proved to be difficult in practice. When I finally escaped suburban expectations of acceptable femininity and sexuality by going to university, I desperately tried to
liberate myself from the same judgment that banned Madonna’s videos from “good society.” I met a very nice boy who tied me up with silk scarves and called me a “cunt” when I asked him to. His love for me grew until it bordered on obsession, and his need to dominate me bled outside our playtime until it was intolerable. He eventually ended up on my doorstep, brandishing a scalpel and yelling “you fucking bitch.”

While hiding your sexual self is damaging, sometimes yanking it out of the closet and subjecting it to experimentation can be even more painful. My desire to be demeaned by my lovers grew with every new sexual discovery, but the idea that “nice girls don’t” continued with every disappointed look I received when I asked to be tied up and called a whore. Those early filmic representations of unabashed BDSM celebration and the holy nature of submission were all the more clear to me, but the possibility of enacting them seemed further and further away. It turned out that the fantasy reenactment was just that: fantasy. It failed to translate well into real life and left a loneliness within me that refused to leave regardless of how hard I tried to fake “normal.” Coming out as submissive is difficult in both the white-bread normalcy of suburban culture and the faux-progressive siren song of modern feminism.

I failed to fit anywhere.

The 2001 video for “What It Feels Like for a Girl” also failed to fit the rules of daytime programming, relegated to “safe harbor” by the fear that its violence would offend. Unlike previous controversies, the Guy Ritchie-directed creation is largely sexless, depicting Madonna and an elderly companion on a reckless crime spree in a stolen Camaro. Its “violent” content is almost laughable when compared to the violence and sexist torture-porn of modern prime time. Madonna herself called the contents of the video “fantasy and doing things that girls are not allowed to do,” and having it banned only furthered her point.
The song itself is a condemnation of double standards, the extreme burdens women are forced to carry via their sexuality, the quiet suffering they endure while balancing expectations and personal authenticity. It is an anthem for frustrated dismay, delivered sweetly.

At the time I first heard the song, my post-university boyfriend was telling me how “nice girls” were allowed to act, and I was complicit in that burden of inauthenticity by desperately attempting to be “normal.” I was doing all of the things good girls were supposed to do, baking pies in false domestic bliss and polishing my exterior in an effort to pass. The video was an extreme representation of what I longed for; something unexpected, something denied to me, something outside the false norm—Madonna’s character is a victim who suddenly, gloriously, refuses to be victimized.

Most importantly, the release of “What It Feels Like for a Girl” marked a time of personal realization that my desire for submission was not about sex. It wasn’t about sex when Ken practiced bondage techniques on Barbie and it wasn’t when a boy tied me up with silk scarves in his dorm room. Of course the acts included sex, but the need for it was more about disposing of an artifice that was suffocating me—the binaries of what good girls can and can’t do, want and can’t want. Submission was Holy Communion with my authentic self, a self that the rest of the world had tried to keep me from, a self that was relegated to “safe harbor” by social moral obligation. Submission was a moment where my identity, and the necessary armor that comes from a life lived female, was stripped bare. In private submissive moments exist a real yearning free of cultural projection, a moment that subsequently terrifies mainstream mores. The ability to share that vulnerability with another person and strip it of supposed shame was, for me, the only real way to transcend sanctioned and restrained sexuality.